The legal and constitutional relationship between Ireland and England (and latterly Britain) was unclear for many centuries. Although Ireland enjoyed a good deal of legislative sovereignty under Grattan’s Parliament from 1782, the Acts of Union in 1801 set up direct rule from Westminster. During the nineteenth century, there was a campaign and draft legislation for Irish Home Rule (which Dicey, an ardent unionist, vehemently opposed). This campaign is worth reconsidering in the Brexit/Scottish independence context, given the varied legal and constitutional arrangements that were explored and vigorously debated. However, Home Rule never came about, rendered pointless by subsequent events. Since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and devolution in 1998, Northern Ireland has a had a variegated but pragmatic settlement of consociation and compromise quite different from the traditional British constitutional settlement. The EU has played its role in the peace process, providing structures for its continuation. Brexit now presents considerable challenges for Northern Ireland and the Republic.

The union of Scotland and England was the founding act of the UK in 1707, and consensually agreed between two sovereign parties. Scotland was never a colony of England and post-union retained considerable autonomy, including its distinct and separate legal and education systems and Church. As a result of the 1707 union, the UK Parliament (which was not simply the English Parliament enlarged) came into being. The doctrine of unlimited parliamentary sovereignty is not accepted by everyone in Scotland, where there exists an alternative Scottish tradition of popular sovereignty, and the belief that Scotland’s place in the UK Union rests on its consent. Since devolution in 1998, Scotland has developed some progressive constitutional forms, as well as more pro-European inclinations that challenge the unitary constitutional approaches of London. Brexit, however, has placed the UK union under strain, and there have been demands for a second Scottish Independence referendum. Surprisingly, despite the threat of Scottish independence, there has been little debate about what the ‘Union’ or ‘Britain’ is or should be.

Chapter 3 analyzes how, within a newly expanded marketplace for print, a combination of manuscript and printed letters helped shape the ways in which the Company of Scotland’s Darien venture (1695–1700) and its subsequent failure came to be understood in cultural memory. Letters in both manuscript and printed form helped establish the company. Letters also served to connect the company directors with the colonists in Darien, and, when published in pamphlet form, they provided information and propaganda about the new colony to the nation back home. After the collapse of the Darien settlement, letters also became the evidence used to shape the cultural memory of the disaster. The chapter traces how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the cultural memory of Darien was erased by the bigger controversies surrounding the implications of the Acts of Union (1707) for the Scottish nation. Lastly, it considers how the rediscovery and publication of the Darien papers by John Hill Burton in 1849 brought them back into focus as a site of cultural memory.